


Faking Cheunh for Fun and Profit

by anthean



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Outbound Flight - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Conlangs, Gen, Languages and Linguistics, Meta, Not Fic, author is barely a linguist but can fake it pretty good, nerd alert nerd alert, this is just a vehicle for the author's theories about cheunh phonology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 19:11:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17648327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthean/pseuds/anthean
Summary: Some notes about patterns I’ve noticed in the small amount of Cheunh language we get in the Thrawn novels! So if you’re, say, writing some fanfic and need to invent some Cheunh dialog, you can come up with something that roughly matches the examples we get in-text.I was going to post this on tumblr, but this seemed less likely to get purged.





	Faking Cheunh for Fun and Profit

**Author's Note:**

> I know there are generators out there for Cheunh text, but as someone with a lifelong fascination with constructed languages (too much Tolkien at a formative age) it's a lot more fun for me to invent my own Cheunh when I need it. This is what I think about when I'm doing that, in case it's helpful to someone else.

What this is: some notes about patterns I’ve noticed in the small amount of Cheunh language we get in the _Thrawn_ novels! So if you’re, say, writing some fanfic and need to invent some Cheunh dialog, you can come up with something that roughly matches the examples we get in-text.

What this is not: a comprehensive analysis of the Cheunh language (there are only like ten actual words we know), lessons on how to speak Cheunh (we only really have written examples and no guides for pronunciation), a Cheunh dictionary (see “only like ten actual words”)

I'm also focusing pretty exclusively on sounds/writing here rather than going into grammar/syntax, because once I do that it becomes almost entirely speculative. Focusing on sounds/writing means I can keep it only _mostly_ speculative.

A small disclaimer: I am not a linguist! I have a minor in linguistics from a major American university, and the research I do now is informed by formal linguistics, but I would not call myself an actual for-real linguist. I just like languages and have a long-standing fascination with conlangs. Please feel free to comment or correct me!

Also, I’ve read _Star Wars: Thrawn, Thrawn: Alliances,_ and _Outbound Flight_ , so those are my primary sources for this post. I’ve consulted a few Wookieepedia articles, but have no real intention of reading the remaining EU Thrawn novels and I’m completely unfamiliar with the RPGs, so there could be stuff in there that I miss.

Onward!

* * *

**What we know from canon** : Cheunh grammar is “logical and relatively easy to learn” ( _Outbound Flight_ ), is constructed around “core words” that are augmented with prefixes and suffixes, and is straightforward for humans to understand but difficult for them to pronounce. We have a few examples of dialog and a bunch of proper names.

And that’s about it.

**So How Can I Convincingly Fake Cheunh?**

_Letters/Sounds:_

The letters that appear in Cheunh are pretty straightforward! Cheunh includes most of the letters found in English, with a few minor exceptions. Also, note that I’m sort of conflating letters and sounds here: as we know from English, words aren’t always pronounced the way they’re spelled, and sometimes one letter can correspond to multiple sounds. Because we have very few examples of how written Cheunh is actually _pronounced_ , I’m mostly focusing on letters and spelling, but diverge into sounds occasionally because they’re interesting.

Consonants: p b t d k f v s [sh] [th] r l m n w h c

/c/ appears, like in English, to be able to represent either an s or a k sound. I put [sh] and [th] in brackets because they actually each represent a single sound, written as /ʃ/ and /θ/ respectively.

Making clusters of consonants is also acceptable in Cheunh, although there don’t seem to be many long strings of consonants. The longest consonant string I could find was the [ntr] in “bintrano”, a family name. There are also [nt], [ld], [rm], [mb], and a bunch more, most of which are totally normal English clusters. An exception is [kth], appearing at the beginning of the family name “kthira”, and [kt], appearing at the beginning of the family name “ktarloo”. Those are a little weird. [cs] also appears at the beginning of “Csilla” and “Csaplar”.

Cheunh also includes a few special sounds called affricates. The most obvious one is the [ch] sound that you see in _Ch_ iss and _Ch_ eunh. There also might be a [ j  ] sound, like in English _j_ udge or _j_ ury. However, I could only find this in the name Jer’jo, the name of one of the founding Chiss syndics. It’s possible that either this sound exists in modern Cheunh but not in any of the examples we see in the books, or disappeared from the language between the time Jer’jo was alive and the time the books are set.

We also see the word “ _tli_ ”, in the sentence “Ris ficar _tli_ claristae su fariml’sroca” ( _Outbound Flight_ , pg 46). You could definitely pronounce that as just a t and an l next to each other. However, because this is an alien language and I think it’s cool I choose to interpret the /tl/ cluster as an affricate called a [voiceless alveolar lateral affricate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_affricate), written as /t͡ɬ/. This sound doesn’t appear in English!

Vowels: a e i o u (and sometimes y)

There are instances of vowels at both the beginnings and ends of words (see _ozyly-esehembo_ , “sky-walker”; _Thrawn: Alliances_ pg 252).

There are also a bunch of cases where two (or more) vowels appear next to each other. These could be diphthongs, which are combinations of two adjacent vowel sounds. Or they could be used to represent single vowel sounds that aren’t covered by a/e/i/o/u. These vowel clusters are: ae ia eu ou ai eo oo ee aau

I don’t really know what to make of these, given that there’s no authorial direction for how they should be pronounced. I just pronounce them by going with my instinct as a native English speaker. [ae] is apparently pronounced [ee] (”stae”, a root word meaning “near”, is pronounced “stee”. Thanks, Wookieepedia!). The /ia/ vowel pair also frequently appears near the ends of words: visvia, falliare, pohskapforian.

Interestingly, in _Outbound Flight_ Thrawn pronounces “Corellia” as “K’rell”. There’s no apparent reason for him to do this, because as far as I can tell there’s nothing about the word “Corellia” that should be difficult or unusual for a Cheunh speaker, and the Cheunh place names we get don't follow this pattern. Is he doing this to confuse and annoy Car'das? _Possibly_.

There are a few letters/sounds that are notably missing from Cheunh, but none of them are super weird, linguistically. These are /g/ and /ʒ/ (the s sound in the middle of “vision”). The /z/ sound also seems to be rare; it appears in _ozyly_ , meaning “sky, and in the name Zenta, a Chiss living during the Old Republic Era.

My personal pet theory is that the /z/ sound is mostly archaic, hence why it appears in a very old name but nowhere else, and that _ozyly_ is an older or poetic word for sky, not the word that most Chiss would use everyday. Again, I have no evidence, I just like thinking about it :D

> **Takeway:** There aren’t really any letters you should avoid when you’re faking Cheunh. There are a few that aren’t well-attested, like g, and a few that don’t show up very often, but none that are definitely proscribed. Don’t forget to include that /tl/ cluster, especially at the beginnings of words (because it’s super cool)!

_Glottal Stops!_

aka “those things that make Mitth’raw’nuruodo so freaking hard to pronounce”! These, if you’re unfamiliar, are the little break in sound in the middle of the phrase “uh-oh”. Glottal stops are indicated by apostrophes in written Cheunh. They appear to be found mostly in names, both of people and of places.  Glottal stops appear in single words as well, although much less frequently (ex. _d’moporai_ ).

> **Takeaway:** use glottal stops in names to indicate section breaks, but sparingly in dialog. If I may speculate wildly for a moment, it seems to me like the glottal stop might be used in regular speech to indicate a connection between two or more components of a compound word, or maybe to signal subcategorization of some kind. But I have zero textual support for that :D

_Aspiration!_

> “ _Pohskapforian_ ; _Pohskapforian_ ,” Thrawn pronounced. “Can you hear the difference?”
> 
> Car’das nodded. He could hear the difference between the aspirated and unaspirated p sounds in the second syllable, all right. He just couldn’t make the difference with his own mouth.

Poor Car’das. Aspirated consonants are hard. Aspiration is when you release a puff of air when you say a particular sound. To feel it, hold you hand in front of your mouth and say “Pit, spit” a few times. You should feel a puff of air at the p sound in pit, but not spit. In English, whether or not you aspirate a consonant doesn’t change the meaning of the word. This is different for Cheunh: aspirating the /p/ in “pohskapforian” changes the meaning from “merchant trader” to “fishing boat”.

What’s interesting to me is that these two words (merchant trader and fishing boat) seem fairly closely related rather than being two very different concepts. It seems reasonable to suggest that aspirating a consonant or not is a way to indicate subtle shifts in meaning, rather than totally different words.

Thrawn says that Car’das’s inability to pronounce aspirated consonants is an indication of Cheunh being beyond his physical abilities. However, there are plenty of Earth languages that use aspirated vs unaspirated consonants to change the meaning of a word. If you grew up speaking a language like English, it can be really hard to get a handle on this contrast. So it’s not that the contrastive aspiration in Cheunh is beyond the physical capabilities of all humans, it’s that Car’das probably grew up speaking a language without contrastive aspiration and is therefore having a hard time with it. But a native Hindi speaker, for example, would probably be able to pick up this aspect of Cheunh pretty easily.

> **Takeaway:** we know that /p/ in Cheunh has contrastive aspiration, so that’s a place where your fictional Cheunh learner could experience difficulty. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that /t/ and /k/ might also have contrastive aspiration, if you want to make things even harder. Alternatively, maybe Eli Vanto is familiar with a trade language that developed contrastive aspiration due to contact with Cheunh-speaking Chiss, so learning that aspect of Cheunh isn’t too hard for him.

* * *

 So, these are the things I think about when I'm making up Cheunh words and dialog for my fics. This is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the Cheunh language; rather, it's a collection of things I've noticed, squished together in one document for my own reference. I hope it's helpful, or at least interesting, to you!


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